Posts by James Butler

The cure for free speech you don't like is more speech. Gio's "more speech" was "Hey advertisers, how do you like this?". Advertiser's "more speech" was, on the whole, "Not much". No boycott.

Photo-shopping the head of a female politician onto the body of adult film star is an exercise of free speech, as is publicly commenting upon which people you consider are ugly, and who you would like to “do”. But it is speech that risks discouraging other ideas from being expressed.

And engaging in entitled chauvinistic victim-blaming of a young woman on air is also speech that risks discouraging other ideas from being expressed, specifically any idea a woman might have of reporting a sexual assault. I have no trouble deciding which of these speeches is worth protecting.

Precisely. The cops will be gunning for a hefty chunk of 20 years rather than an equivalent chunk of 10 years.

I would be worried if the Police thought the difference between a 10-year offence and a 20-year offence was worth allowing the alleged offending to continue for two years. Maximum punishment needs to be balanced against harm reduction surely. OTOH if they're not charged with rape it would just be that much harder to convince them (or anyone else who didn't already think so) that what they did was in fact rape.

And visual arts, and in fact most other forms of music. "True" pop is supposedly more ephemeral, but it's full of seasoned pro writers, producers, session players churning out hits. And classical music, whoa. Even Mozart was showing some signs of promise when he died at 37.